This invention is generally related to wireless communication systems and, in particular, to providing information to multiple communication units in a wireless communication system.
With the burgeoning growth of digital wireless communication systems and the internet, a market is evolving for accessing informational sources on the internet via digital wireless communication devices, such as digital pagers, digital cellular telephones, and digital radiotelephones. Affording users of a wireless communication system the ability to wirelessly access web-based servers is becoming an important feature of wireless communication infrastructure and subscriber unit equipment.
One way of implementing such is by use of xe2x80x9cpushxe2x80x9d technology. In push technology, a user of a communication system subscribes to an information service operating a web-based server. The user receives general information widely broadcast to all subscribers to the service and receives information on topics of particular interest to the user. For example, suppose that the user subscribes to an information service that provides stock price information. The user can then receive stock ticker updates and can also receive, at periodic intervals, the latest news or periodic stock quotes with respect to particular stocks of the user""s selection. Similar information services are or will also be provided for sports, news, and weather, among other items of interest, whereby a user will be able to receive a general information along with informational updates on topics of particular interest to the particular user.
An attraction of push technologies is that a user can expect to receive the latest information of particular interest to the user without the intervention of any other party. The simplest way to do this would be to use packet data technology and to transmit the information from a web-based server via the wireless infrastructure to each user individually. However, transmitting the informational updates via the infrastructure on a per user basis is both costly and inefficient because of the extensive communication system resources that would be occupied in the process of attempting to locate the subscription member user and then transmit the information every time an update is available for transmission. An alternative is for the infrastructure to perform a general, wide-area transmission of the informational update. However, a general, wide-area transmission would occupy an excessive amount of infrastructure resources and bandwidth in order to provide information to only a select number of subscription members.
Another problem in conveying information from a web-based server to a pool of subscription members is that the subscription members will be located in a variety of environments, some of which are noisier than others. Some subscription members will receive an informational update correctly on the first transmission, while other subscription members will require multiple retransmissions in order to receive a correct update. This problem can be overcome by establishing individual automatic retransmission request (ARQ) sessions between the infrastructure and each subscriber unit. As mentioned above, this would be very costly and inefficient. Other alternatives are to generally retransmit a wide-area message xe2x80x98nxe2x80x99 times or to add additional forward error correction to the information being transmitted. However, the former would be very wasteful of the limited available communication resources and the latter would consume bandwidth that can be better used to convey the information itself.
Therefore a need exits for a method and apparatus of providing information to multiple communication units in a wireless communication system, that selectively targets a limited group of communication units that need to receive a particular set of information and conveys the set of information utilizing a minimum amount of system resources and bandwidth.